Understanding the Limits of Marxist Approaches to Sociocultural Studies of Science Education

Lima, Paulo, Jr.; Ostermann, Fernanda; Rezende, Flavia

Cultural Studies of Science Education, v9 n4 p1001-1007 Dec 2014

In the first three sections of this paper we comment on some of the ideas developed in the forum papers, pointing out possible misunderstandings and constructing new explanations that clarify arguments we made in the original article. In the last section we expand the discussion raised in the original paper, elaborating on the limits of the use of Marxist approaches to sociocultural studies of science education. Following insights suggested by Loxley et al. ("Cult Stud Sci Educ." doi: 10.1007/s11422-013-9554-z, 2013) and detailed by Zuss ("Cult Stud Sci Educ." doi: 10.1007/s11422-013-9555-y, 2014) on the commodification of knowledge, we sketch an analysis of how knowledge is transformed into capital to understand why contemporary scholars are likely to be engaged in a relation of production that resembles capitalist exploitation.